Science, microphysics, and the everyday world

Science, we’re often told, gives us a description of the world radically at odds with common sense.  Physicist Arthur Eddington’s famous “two tables” example illustrates the theme.  There is, on the one hand, the table familiar from everyday experience – the extended, colored, solid, stable thing you might be sitting at as you read this.  Then there’s the scientific table – a vast aggregate of colorless particles in fields of force, mostly empty space rather a single continuous object, and revealed by theory rather than sensory perception.  What is the relationship between them?  Should we say, as is often done, that the first table is an illusion and only the second real?

As philosopher Gilbert Ryle showed in chapter 5 of his classic book Dilemmas, the real illusion is not the table of common sense, but rather the notion that science gives us any reason to doubt it.  In fact, science is not even addressing the sorts of question common sense might ask about the table, much less giving an answer that conflicts with the one common sense would give.  And it is only conceptual confusion that makes some suppose otherwise.

Ryle’s reminders

Ryle identifies two main sources of this confusion concerning what science tells us about the world.  The first has to do with the word “science” and the second with the word “world.”  For one thing, there is not even a prima facie conflict between our common sense conception of the world and the vast bulk of what falls under the label “science.”  No one thinks philology casts the slightest doubt on the reality of words, or that botany, geology, and meteorology cast any doubt on the reality of plants, earth, or weather.  The findings of such areas of research are not taken to undermine our confidence in the reality of everyday objects.  Nor are telescopes and microscopes taken to give any reason for doubting it, despite revealing objects vastly larger or vastly smaller than the ones we encounter in everyday life.  Nor is what physics tells us about middle-sized objects (pendulums, water pumps, etc.) regarded as challenging our belief in tables and the like.

In fact, Ryle suggests, it is only two special areas of scientific study that people suppose somehow casts doubt on such belief: the microstructure of material objects, and the physiology of perception.  But even here, it is not, strictly speaking, the findings of modern science that are the source of the problem.  Similar claims about the unreality of ordinary objects were made millennia ago on the basis of the speculations of the ancient atomists.

Why don’t the scientific findings, any more than the speculations, cast doubt on the world of common sense?  This brings us to the word “world.”  When we hear tell of the world as described by microphysics, we are, says Ryle, too quick to suppose that “world” should in this context be understood the way it is understood by theologians when they talk about the world’s creation, or that it should interpreted as a synonym for “cosmos.”  But we should think of it instead on the model of phrases like “the world of poultry” as a farmer or butcher might mean it, or “the entertainment world” as a newspaper reporting on what is going on in the field of entertainment would use it.  “World” in such contexts means something like “sphere of interest” or “the collection of matters pertaining to a certain subject” (such as poultry or entertainment).

Now, no one thinks there is some conflict between “the world of poultry” or “the entertainment world” on the one hand, and the world of everyday physical objects on the other.  But neither is there any conflict between the latter world and the world of facts which are the sphere of interest of the scientist who studies the microstructure of matter or the physiology of perception.  As with poultry or entertainment, the “world” of the latter is really just a relatively small subset of all the facts that make up reality.  It is not a comprehensive description of reality that competes with the description taken for granted by common sense.

Ryle offers a couple of analogies to illustrate the point.  When economics characterizes human behavior by way of considerations of profit and loss, supply and demand, and so on, it is not putting forward an exhaustive characterization of the nature of human beings or of any particular human being.  Nor is it mischaracterizing them.  It is simply noting what people will tend to do if they are in circumstances of a certain specific sort, and are attentive to considerations of a certain specific sort.  That’s all.  Similarly, when microphysics characterizes matter in the way it does, it is not to be understood as offering an exhaustive characterization of tables and other everyday physical objects, but simply calling attention to certain features that are manifest under certain circumstances.  That’s all.

Ryle speaks as if the average reader at the time he was writing (the early 1950s) would readily grant that it would be a crude mistake to think that the economist’s description captured the entirety of human nature.  It may be doubted whether all readers today would be immune to such economic reductionism, but in any case, Ryle also offers another analogy.  He asks us to imagine an accountant who has put together an exhaustive description of the financial operations of a certain college – tuition, salaries, rents, costs for utilities and groundskeeping, expenditures on library books, food services, sports, special events, and so on.  Suppose the description covers all the activities and assets of the institution and is extremely precise and useful.

The objectivity, precision, comprehensiveness, and utility of this description would hardly justify the accountant in claiming that he has captured all there is to the college.  Even though there is no part of the college that is not referred to in his ledger, the ledger obviously doesn’t capture all there is to those parts or to the whole they make up.  For example, even if the price of every library book can be found there, the sorts of things that, say, a book reviewer would want to know about a book will not be captured.  But neither would it be correct to say that the description of the college that the accountant gives is in competition with the description that might be given by, say, a student.  Nor would it be correct to say that the accountant’s description is mistaken.  It is correct as far as it goes, but it is simply not meant in the first place to capture everything.

Obviously, it would be silly so speak of there being two colleges, the way that Eddington speaks of there being two tables.  There is just the one college, and certain features of it are focused on by the student for his purposes, whereas others are focused on by the accountant for his own, different purposes.  But the same thing is true of tables and other physical objects as common sense understands them and as the physicist approaches them.  There is just the one table, and the ordinary person in everyday life focuses on certain aspects of it, whereas physics focuses on different aspects.  That’s all.  Physics, rightly understood, no more competes with or refutes the ordinary person’s understanding of the table than the accountant competes with or refutes the student’s understanding of the college.

Ryle notes that it is tempting to say that common sense and microphysics give different but complementary “descriptions” or “pictures” of the same reality, but he argues that even this is misleading, insofar as it implicitly attributes a far greater commonality of purpose that actually exists between the two.  For there is no reason to think of microphysics as attempting in the first place to “picture” the reality of a table or any other ordinary physical object (as opposed to explaining certain features of it, or predicting its behavior under such-and-such circumstances, or figuring out how to manipulate it in certain ways – none of which entails or requires a “picture” of its full reality).

Ryle also notes that nothing in what he says implies or is intended to imply any contribution to, or criticism of, scientific practice or scientific results.  It is merely a point about the fallaciousness of certain kinds of claims made about the everyday world on the basis of science.

Hossenfelder and Goff

Regrettably, even seventy years after Ryle wrote, too many philosophers and scientists alike still need a reminder of these observations, simple and obvious though they ought to be.  Physicist Brian Greene provided a good example not too long ago.  Another case in point is a recent Twitter exchange between philosopher Philip Goff and physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, and the debate on Twitter that it engendered.  To be sure, neither Hossenfelder nor Goff would say that physics provides an exhaustive description of physical reality.  In that way their views align with Ryle’s main point (albeit neither brings up Ryle).  However, they miss some of its other implications.

For example, Hossenfelder not only takes an instrumentalist view of physics, but seems to think it obvious that physics just is, of its nature, instrumentalist – that when it makes reference to electrons, for example, there is no implication whatsoever that electrons actually exist, as opposed to being merely a useful fiction for organizing observations and making predictions.  But while instrumentalism is certainly defensible, it seems to me a mistake to think it the obviously correct interpretation of physics.  This is like saying that the accountant’s description of the college, in Ryle’s example, is obviously nothing more than a useful fiction, and that its utility gives us no reason at all to believe that it captures anything really there in the college.  In fact, of course, the accountant’s description does capture real features of the college, even if only very abstract economic relations and far from all, or even the most important, features of the college.  Similarly, the utility of physics gives us reason to think it does capture real features of the world, even if they are highly abstract structural features and very far from an exhaustive description of nature.  I defend this epistemic structural realist interpretation of physics in Aristotle’s Revenge.

Goff, meanwhile, himself accepts this interpretation of physics.  However, he falls into another error.  Physics captures only very abstract structural features of physical reality.  But what about the other features?   What fleshes out this abstract structure?  Goff is among the growing number of writers who argue for panpsychism by proposing that qualia, the characteristic features of conscious experience (the way red looks, the way coffee smells, and the like) provide a model for understanding the intrinsic nature of all physical reality.  He presents this as a bold solution to what would otherwise be a great mystery.

To see what is wrong with this, imagine someone who noted that Ryle’s accountant provides only a very abstract description of the college’s economic structure, and then argued: “Something must flesh out that abstract structure.  Whatever could it be?  What a mystery!  I postulate that it is qualia that flesh it out, and thus that, strange as it may seem, the college is – from the lecture halls to the library to the cafeteria and down to every floorboard of the gym – a panpsychist entity pulsating with consciousness!”

The main problem with this argument is not that it leads to a ludicrous conclusion, though it certainly does.  The problem is that it is a “solution” to something that isn’t a mystery in the first place.  Certainly, the abstractness of the accountant’s description of the college doesn’t pose any mystery whatsoever.  We already know what the intrinsic properties of the college are – they are simply those that every student, professor, administrator and janitor already knows about, just by walking around and looking at it from day to day.  The accountant has simply ignored all this detail that we already know about, and focused instead on certain abstract economic features.

Similarly, we already know what the intrinsic features are of tables and other ordinary physical objects.  They are precisely those we come across in dealing with these objects every day.  Physics simply ignores these features and focuses on those of which it can give a precise mathematical treatment.  There is no mystery that needs solving in terms of some bizarre metaphysics like panpsychism, but merely a reminder of what we already know from common sense.  Ryle (like Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and other critics of revisionist metaphysics) offers precisely such a reminder.  (I have criticized Goff’s views along these lines but at greater length before, here and here.)

Some scientists who commented on the exchange between Hossenfelder and Goff on Twitter opined that it illustrates why many scientists don’t find such discussions fruitful.  According to one of them, the reason they are unfruitful is that they don’t help us do physics better.  But why on earth should anyone suppose that the only reason why a discussion between physicists and philosophers would be worthwhile would be if it helps the former do physics better?  Putting the implicit narcissism to one side, there is another problem.  As Ryle says, the point of his own remarks is not to either criticize or add to science’s methodology or results, but rather to reveal the fallaciousness of certain inferences drawn from its methodology or results.  A scientist who thinks such a message not worthwhile is precisely the sort of person most in need of hearing it.

(Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on Dr. Feser’s blog in a slightly different form and is reprinted here with the author’s kind permission.)